LIKE
many species of bats, dolphins and their toothed whale relatives, too
locate prey by echolocation. Now it is a established fact that
dolphins can not only ‘see’ with sound, but can also kill their
prey with it.

By bouncing
high-frequency sounds off an underwater target and analysing the
signal it gets back, a dolphin can not only pinpoint an object and
determine whether and where it is moving, it can also differentiate
between various object densities, for instance, fat from bone, and can
also make out whether the target is dead or alive. It can stun and
sometimes kill it with a high intensity beam of sound.

These sounds which are mostly in the
form of clicks and bursts of clicks are produced by pushing air
backwards and forwardsthrough a
complicated plumbing system at the back of the nostrils. The sounds
pass through the fatty, bulbous ‘melon’ in the forehead, where
they are focused into a narrow beam of ultrasound. The returning echo
is picked up by the teeth of the lower jaw and the signal transmitted
through the jaw and up to the brain. Using the system, a trained
dolphin can distinguish a tangerine from a small metal ball at a
distance of 370ft. In laboratory tests, dolphins have produced such
powerful soundsthat they are
close to the finite limit of sound. Any louder and they would turn to
heat. With such a weapon, dolphins are formidable predators.

They first use their sound system to locate schools of fish or squid, and then
they spray them with high-intensity sound beams. Striped dolphins have been seen
to circle an anchovy school, zap them with sound, and then cut throughthe debilitated fish, shovelling them into
their jaws at will. Near Vancouver, a similar observation was made with killer
whales. A large salmon was clearly visible swimming in the water next to a
fishing boat. Along came a pod of killer whales and the salmon was stopped dead
in its tracks. One of the whales scooped up the salmon and swam on. Had it been
stopped by sound? Perhaps it was. Evidence from another relative of the dolphins
seems to suggest that killing with sound is realityrather
than speculation.

The biggest of the toothed
whales is the sperm whale, with an omnibus-sized body and an enormous fatty body
in its forehead, known as the spermaceti organ. Sperm whales, like dolphins,
produce echolocation clicks, and they go hunting in the deep sea. Their
favourite prey seems to be giant squid, the world’s largest invertebrate that
may grow 70ft long (measured from tentacle tip to body tip) and which have
rarely been seen alive. Most specimens have either been washed up dead on the
shore or found as pieces in the stomachs of sperm whales caught by whaling
ships.

The curious thing, though, is that some whales
have been caught that show malformations of the lower jaw, yet their stomachs
are filled with squid. The theory is that the squids are zapped with enormous
quantities of ultrasound and, thus neutralised, their inert bodies are slurped
in by the whale. Tests have shown that squid can be killed with high-intensity
blasts of sound, and researchers listening with underwater microphones to
hunting sperm whales have reported that they produce very loud, rifle-like
cracks that are thought to be salvos of killing sound. The large, saucer-sized,
sucker marks on the heads of some sperm whales are witness to the giants who did
not succumb to the sound bombardment and tried to fight back.